Tag Archives: fiber

Fibers are non-digestible carbohydrates and are plant based. Fiber is most beneficial when it is cellular – intact within the cell structure.

Cooking with fresh minimally processed plant based ingredients is an excellent way to put more fibers on the plate.

🟢Salade Composée. Scratch cooking is the opposite of convenience.

Cooking from scratch takes time, dollars, commitment. And knowing how to relate to food independent of nutrients helps a lot.

This picture dates from 2015. But it reflects what I learned about good food growing up in California and cooking in France. Good food starts with good ingredients. And what makes an ingredient good has precious little to do with nutrient composition. Or convenience.

Since I decided to do another saladé composeé for a colleague who is coming for lunch this week, I’ll use the picture as an example of what good food means to me. Good ingredients mean careful sourcing. But that’s what it takes so each ingredient contributes its own unique taste and texture. And there’s nothing fast, easy, convenient, or efficient about souring good ingredients.

Here’s what I need to get started: farro, beans, vinaigrette (oil, vinegar, mustard), tuna, egg, cucumber, tomatoes, cabbage, parsley, salt.

I looked in my kitchen and found pastured eggs, red cabbage, California extra-virgin olive oil, sherry vinegar, Dijon mustard, cooked cicerchia beans (an Italian heirloom bean), jared hand packed tuna, and some emmer spelt (farro) in my freezer.

Never heard of farro? Trust me, you’re not alone. It’s the Italian word for what we Americans call an ancient grain / emmer spelt.  Italian farro is sold refined (pearled) or whole grain (un-pearled). I love the chewy texture and complex taste of whole grain farro so I’ve searched out American grain farmers who grow farro and sell over the internet. I recently bought a 5 pound bag, so I pulled that bag out of the freezer, removed a cup or so, and started cooked the farro. It takes several hours to soften the wheat kernels enough to develop that chewy texture.

My regional market supplied the ingredients. It’s May here in the Hudson Valley and locally grown won’t start to come in until July. So I need to fall back on commodity / hothouse crops and California imports.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Our American paradigm for a healthy pattern is nutrient focused and commodity based. In that order. Since the 1990s, the Nutrition Facts Label has reinforced the nutrient supremacy message. And commodity crops are the basis for our Dietary Guidelines food groups. The result is that many Americans and most health professionals have forgotten about what I call good food.

The food police are going to bang on my head for my generous hand with the olive oil. The amount I used exceeds 20% which means I used smidgen more olive oil than the food police likes to see. More important however, if I had put the salad together with commodity products – tuna in a pouch, a cheaper seed oil, a random off the shelf can of chickpeas – well the taste just wouldn’t have been the same. Sourcing and preparation would have been faster and probably cheaper but convenience would have come at the cost of good taste.

🟢Seafood Stew • The Joys of Freshly Prepared.

Americans love convenience. A quick snack to grab and go. A pouch to throw in the microwave that is ready to eat in five minutes. Our American food culture is based on convenience. Perhaps that why so many Americans have so little interest in cooking.

There’s plenty of joy in the taste of freshly prepared but there’s nothing convenient about cooking from scratch.

What does it take to cook? It takes time. And skill. And financial means. And commitment. And patience. Cooking is the opposite of convenience. The US leads the globe in the development and marketing of ultra-processed. And I don’t see our passion for #UPF fading any time soon.

Consider the time and labor required to put that seafood stew together! For starters, I needed to assemble 15 ingredients which included a good brand of imported Italian pelati (peeled tomatoes), some cod and shrimp, jarred roasted peppers, olive oil, an honest baguette, and the usual aromatics – onion, fennel, parsley, garlic. And I decided to use heritage white beans so they needed to be prepared before I could start. All that before I could walk into the kitchen and begin the job of washing, chopping, cooking, and cleaning up.

The nutrition label is my best approximation of a serving based on the recipe that inspired me. Roughly speaking, the proportions serve 4 to 6 people and the Facts Label reflect nutrients for 4 servings.

Salted to taste with just the right amount to highlight the other flavors but never so much that salt overpowers. There’s a special forces unit of the food police that monitors compliance with Dietary Guidelines and they will bang on my head for using too much salt. Aside from that, however, there’s not much else for the unit to complain about. Good fiber. Good protein. And lots of potassium.

Why would anyone work as hard as I did to put that beautiful mixture of fish and aromatics and tomato and beans on the plate? Because the joys of freshly prepared are no more and no less than the pleasure we humans derive from fueling our bodies with food that tastes really really good.

🟡 Mexican Black Beans • Convenience & Salt

Chefs love salt and so do home cooks like me. Never too much salt. But always Just enough so the meals and main dishes we put on the table taste good.

I like convenience and these Mexican Black Beans work for me. You’ll find a couple of pouches in my pantry so when I need to I can put a meal together quickly. Like the shrimp tacos I make using frozen shrimp. Or a meal of rice and black beans and some leftover chicken. 

The ingredient list reads like what I use for scratch cooking. The degree of processing is just different. Powdered onion and garlic instead of intact aromatics. Seed oil instead of olive oil. Since the product is industrially formulated with 5 or more ingredients, technically it would be classified as ultra-processed. But clean labeled convenience products made with intact ingredients are always acceptable in my kitchen.

I grew up eating Mexican street food and have always liked the taste of beans. Dietitians and food labelers get all hung up in the discussion of VEGGIES vs PROTEIN food groups. Why do they get so hung up? Because one food can’t be present in two groups. As for me, I don’t have that problem. I say beans or pulses can fit in both groups. Then I sit down and enjoy my dinner.

These Mexican black beans have a moderate amount of salt. How do you know if the amount is moderate? Check the label. A low amount of sodium would be 10% DV. A high amount would be 20%. These Mexican bean are right in the middle at 14%. And that’s just the right amount to taste good to me.

The food police folks will argue the product has too much salt. And that’s technically accurate.  To market a food product as “healthy”, the DV should be <10%. As I’ve learned however in my exploration of the disconnect between what the experts tell us to eat & the real food I actually, most of the convenience products that can be labeled “healthy” don’t taste good to me.

Finally for those of you who relate better to numbers than to words, my favorite food app  GoCoCo scores the product 10/10.

🟢 Roasted Chickpeas. PlantBased. Fatty. Salty. Tasty.


Food addiction has never made sense to my simplistic mind. I know it’s trendy and fashionable but I just don’t get it. For the record, I took The Yale Food Addiction Scale, a series of questions designed specifically to assess signs of addictive-like eating behavior and I passed with flying colors. I love food. And I love to eat. And that’s what qualifies me on the YFAS tells as addicted!

If however there was ever a food that sort of qualified in my mind or my gut as “addictive” it’s those homemade roasted chickpeas pictured above. Lucky for me it’s really time consuming and tedious to make them myself. And lucky for me too that those convenience branded off the shelf products just don’t cut it. My home made beauties just taste so much better.

The ingredient list for my home made version reads – chickpeas, olive oil, salt. That’s as simple and straightforward as you can get.

Marketeers sell the benefits. And benefits are communicated with as many certification stickers as the designer can fit on package. Check out the healthy section of the supermarket and you’ll see a shout out for health claims and authenticity claims on every package of roasted chickpeas. Gluten Free. Grain Free. Nut Free. Vegan. NonGMO, Dairy Free. High Fiber. Plant-based Protein.

Industrial formulators love flavors. So it’s easy to spot a selection of flavor additives on package roasted chickpea products. I’ve noted cane sugar, natural flavor, citric acid, rosemary extract. And for extra pizazz I’ve seen innovative additions like balsamic vinegar and cracked pepper.

The advantage of course to the package product is convenience. Opening a package and gobbling it down is neither time consuming or tedious.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

There are so many certification stickers on some of the brands there’s hardly room for anything else. I’m assuming manufacturers put certifications on their products to promote sales. But have you ever wondered why certifications sell? The question has puzzled me for some time because I’m not attracted by a certification. But I think I may have finally figured out why.

I’m used to food categories and nutrients because I been food obsessed since birth and I used to be a dietitian. Imagine however how different the food world looks if you’ve grown up in a food culture that provided no hands on experience with food or access to nutrition education.

Suppose you don’t already know that a chickpea and a garbanzo bean are two different names for the same plant seed. Or if you’ve never realized that chickpeas can be sold in different stages of processing? Dried, packaged, and minimally processed. Processed and canned with salt. Or ultra-processed, roasted, packaged, and marketed in brightly colored packaged covered with certifications.

I already know that all chickpeas no matter the degree of processing are gluten free, dairy free, nut free, vegan, plant based, and a food source of fiber. For me it’s just common sense. But what I’ve come to appreciate is that there is a sizable number of my fellow Americans who are not as food literate as I am.

🟢Steel Cut Oats. Warm, chewy, sweet, and healthy.


A bowl of oatmeal made with steel cut oats is one of my favorite breakfasts. Especially appreciated when it’s cold outside and I want something warm inside my gut.

Steel cut oats are the closest version to oats in their whole, unprocessed form. Those unprocessed oats are called oat groats. Making oatmeal with steel cut oats is a time intensive process so it’s understandable why most of my fellow Americans prefer the option of quick cooked oats. But nothing can match the flavor of a well cooked soft, chewy, deliciously nutty consistency bowl of steel cut oatmeal.

The ingredient I use to make a bowl of oatmeal reads clean and un-trafficked: water, steel cut oats, blueberries, strawberries, pecans, turbinado sugar, butter, salt. You can see the pecans if you look closely for brown edges peaking out from time to time between oats and fruits. The ingredients I use are mostly minimally processed except for the culinary processed ingredients – sugar, butter, salt.

In one of those rare moments of consensus what tastes delicious to me actually matches what the friendly food police would allow me to label healthy. Whole Grains, Fruit, Protein (pecans are now protein foods) qualify my bowl of oatmeal as food. And as long as I limit my serving size to one cup, those nutrients of concern (added sugar, sodium, saturated fat) comply with current “healthy” thresholds.

In today’s food marketplace, oatmeals come in different degrees of processing. At one extreme is my bowl of steel cut oatmeal – time consuming to make and labor intensive to source and prep. At the other extreme is off the shelf instant oatmeal – boil in a cup, just add water, no added sugar made with novel or artificial sweeteners, often fortified with folate, and definitively #UPF ultra-processed.

And that brings me to the food matrix and cellular / acellular nutrition.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

The USDA defines “food matrix” as the nutrient and non-nutrient components of foods and their molecular relationships to each other. In other words the food matrix is the cell’s molecular structure.

There’s a complementary concept floating in and out of certain European research studies that focuses on cellular nutrients. The logic goes something like this – nutrients that remain within the cell structure – cellular nutrients – take longer to metabolize and by extension are considered healthier than nutrients that have been extracted then added back in.

Here in the US, both enrichment and fortification are common practice. And both processes require adding isolated nutrients back into a food product. Both are examples of acellular nutrients. Acellular nutrients are rapidly and completely digested in the stomach and small intestines.

Does the body care are whether nutrients arrive in a cellular structure or if these nutrients are acellular? Here in the US, the answer is pretty consistently that it makes no difference. Moreover, folate fortification has good research data to support a clear health benefit.

What can be said with certainty however is that our gut evolved over the millennia to metabolism cellular nutrients, not acellular nutrients.

🟢Green Split Pea Soup. Too much salt.

Winter is soup weather. The colder it get outside, and trust me here in New York’s Hudson Valley it can get pretty chilly, the more I appreciate a bowl of steaming hot soup. Warms me up from the inside out.

My ingredient list is simple. Green split peas, water, mirepoix (onion, carrot, fennel), olive oil, salt. It’s a tradition recipes made from scratch with no assistance from any processed or ultra-processed products so the recipes gets a green 🟢 dot.

I think I just heard someone ask what is a mirepoix? Mirepoix is a French word and it’s the basic flavor enhancement made for much of classic French cuisine. The French version consists of onion, carrot, celery. But the concept is global, infinitely mutable, and every traditional culinary cuisines uses some form of aromatic vegetable flavor base. It’s how cooks and chefs enhanced flavor prior to the industrial food era.

The taste of home made split pea soup can’t be captured in any canned or instant soup I’ve ever tasted. Cleaner. Fresher. More robust fully developed flavors. I’m not a food scientist so I can’t tell you why however. What I do know is the best quality ingredients make the most flavorful soup.

Industrially formulated soups will sometimes use combinations of aromatic vegetables but today it’s also common to use artificial or natural flavors. Industrial processors find it easier and cheaper to pick and choose from the myriad of flavorings now available.

Whether you are an home cook like me or an industrial manufacturer, the problem with soup is the same. Too much salt. Soup is notorious for being high in sodium. My home made version uses less than commercial brands do, but it’s still a lot. And for sure when it comes to using the word “healthy” on a product label, “healthy” is the Kiss of Death ☠️.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Within our regulatory framework, there are multiple perspectives on how to evaluate salt and health outcomes. The health problem with salt is the relationship between sodium and blood pressure in some people. And the problem with high blood pressure is it can increase the risk for cardiovascular vascular disease. It’s at this point regulatory guidelines can get messy. Using the example of my homemade soup, let’s take a look at just how messy …

❌ The Nutrition Facts Label reflect a high sodium value. High means a cup provided more than 20% of the DV (Daily Value). The Dietary Guidelines has set the value for sodium at 2300mg per day using CDRR (Chronic Disease Risk Reduction) methodology.

✅ The FDA has established a Voluntary Sodium Reduction program for food processors and restaurants. This program evaluates sodium using grams per 100 for shelf stable soup. Without boring you with calculations, my homemade spite pea soup is already below target for all three categories – restaurant, frozen, and shelf stable soups.

It’s a dilemma and a bit of a kerfuffle. Is the food police going to come after me because when I salt to taste, I increase my risk for cardio vascular problems? Or should I get a standing ovation because I’m doing better than most of my fellow Americans because I my split pea soup is homemade?

🟢Walnut, Raisin, Rolled Oat Cookies. Too much sugar.

Cookies are scrumptious little bundles of calorie dense fat and sugar. And yes, there’s no way to argue than a good cookie is nutrient dense. Even a good cookie with made with whole grains and lots of walnuts and raisins like my home baked cookies pictured above.

So my little home baked beauties pictured above don’t stand a chance. I do use good ingredients so the list is NOVA friendly 🟢. The ingredient list includes minimally processed (rolled oats, walnuts, raisins, whole wheat flour, egg), some processed culinary (butter, sugar, salt), and only one ultra-processed (vanilla). But do NOVA friendly ingredients make my cookies nutrient dense?

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) considers a food product healthy if two conditions are met. First there must be a “meaningful amount” of food from at least one of the five food groups. Second, nutrient dense as determined by the amount of sodium, saturated fat, added sugars per serving.

Do my carefully sourced ingredients constitute a “meaningful amount”? No problem here. But that’s also true for a comparable premium branded product. How about those nutrient thresholds? Comparing my cookies by weight to a comparable branded product, both the percentage DVs are virtually the same. Both are equally “unhealthy” and both equally tasty.

Could a manufacturer engineer a “healthy” fat free sugar free oatmeal raisin cookie? Absolutely yes I’m convinced it could be done.  If there’s customer demand for it, food manufacturers will find a way to make it happen by substituting novel or artificial sweeteners for sugar.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Here’s my take on sugar and sugar substitutes. The best approach is to develop a taste for less sweet things. The next best approach is to be mindful of the options:

• Novel. These are sweeteners derived from natural plant sources. They are called novel because unlike cane sugar they have not been part of our usual American dietary pattern until recently.   Allulose, Monk fruit, Stevia, Agave, and Tagatose are the most common.

• Artificial. These sweeteners are laboratory engineered and manufactured. The list includes Aspartame, Saccharin, Sucralose, and Various Sugar Alcohols.

• Traditional. These are sweeteners we recognize. Besides cane or beet sugar, the list includes honey, dates, maple syrup, molasses.

My personal choice is traditional sweeteners because I like the taste. But I don’t have much of a sweet tooth so I’m not at risk for developing an addiction. And I’m not diabetic.

🟡Steamed Artichokes. Exceptions to every rule.

The artichoke may be the most daunting vegetable to challenge human culinary creativity. Thorny on the outside. Tough and fibrous on the inside. Except of course for the tip of each leaf and that artichoke heart which is savory, delicate, but inedible unless the choke is removed. The artichokes pictured above are French from a farmers market just outside of Paris. But they look just like the artichokes I used to eat growing up in California.

My preferred preparation is to steam artichokes and serve them cold or room temperature with a dressing part whole milk yogurt and part commercial mayonnaise.

But 66% calories UPF! How is that possible?  How can such a simple preparation be so significantly ultra-processed? The answer is because it’s customary to count UPF by weight when describing supermarket shelf space but to count UPF by calories when describing consumption.

That means we need to check both ingredients and calories. The artichokes themselves are minimally processed of course. My plain yogurt is processed. Milk becomes yogurt through fermentation, a traditional processing method that preserves whole milk by means of lactic acid.

The culprit is the commercial mayonnaise. I make the dressing 2 parts yogurt to one part mayonnaise. By weight, the mayonnaise constitutes only 12% UPF of the weigh of the sauce. By calories, the numbers look a lot different however. The ingredients for a good off the shelf mayo starts with oil, usually soybean or canola, eggs, vinegar, salt, sometimes sugar, preservatives, flavors. It’s the presence of preservatives and flavors that determine degree of processing but it’s the oil that determines the calorie contribution. So it’s the mayo that is responsible for that scary percentage –  66% UPF. And that’s the reason my steamed artichokes get a yellow 🟡 dot.

Do I know how to make my own mayonnaise? Yes I do. Am I going to stop using off the shelf mayo because it has added flavors and preservatives. No way.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Here’s my take on flavor additives and preservatives.

• Preservatives. I don’t have a problem with their use. Some are better than others, but the way I see things, a preservative is better than food poisoning.

• Flavors. I do have a problem with added flavors because I want flavor to come from the food on the plate. It also doesn’t matter to me if flavor is laboratory engineered or extracted from natural ingredients. I avoid both. Flavor should come from quality ingredients. Like robust freshly harvested artichokes. Or naturally fermented plain yogurt. But I don’t get concerned when the manufacturer adds a flavor to the mayo unless I am willing to make time to do the grunt work myself.

🟡Grilled Chicken, Red Peppers, Pinto Beans, Pasta. Moderate salt.

Food is complex. Nutrition is wicked hard. Cutting through all those layers is no small feat, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Americans are used to starting with nutrients. So my first suggestion is to forget nutrients for a moment and focus on the food. Those gorgeous red peppers. The grilled chicken strips. That occasional pinto bean that is peeking out here and there. Or the pasta. The Italians call the pasta “elicodale” which translates into English as spiral shaped and as you can see those deep ridges create a sort of spiral pattern.

The grilled chicken dish is freshly prepared with traditional ingredients. But as noted above, nearly a third of the calories come from ingredients which are classified as ultra-processed – NOVA Group 4 UPF. These ingredients are the grilled chicken, the vegetable broth, and the tomato basil sauce.

These three items are industrially formulated convenience products and all were developed relatively recently. Home cooks like me know that making vegetable broth or red sauce from scratch takes time. And cutting up and grilling chicken breast strips is messy. Scratch cooking tastes better, but life intercedes so I’m okay using industrially formulated products as long as they are made with simple intact ingredients and do not contain flavors, colors, texture modifiers, or acellular nutrients.

The 29% calories UPF noted above is the sum of the calories from the vegetable broth, grilled chicken, and tomato basil sauce. The yellow 🟡 dot means I used ultraprocessed products but each of the products I used are acceptable. To me.

Focusing on food is easy. For those not used to home cooking, it may take some practice but it’s a skill anyone can develop. It just takes practice.

Focusing on nutrients is not easy.  The Nutrition Facts Label can be helpful for assessing the three nutrients that health professionals recommend limiting. As you’ll note from the label above, the sodium percentage stands out from the other Daily Value percentages. Palatability is as important to me as health when I cook at home so I salt to taste. Although I use salt in moderation, the food police will still bang on my head for using too much salt. Compared to the high sodium valued seen in restaurant meals or Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) however, my moderate use looks a lot better.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

American who pay attention to labels are used to putting nutrients first because that’s the message labels have been reinforcing for the last 50 years. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has been nutrient focused for 5 decades! It wasn’t until December 2024 that a “meaningful amount” of food became a component for using the word “healthy” on food product labels. It’s a positive step however and I applaud the FDA for finally acknowledging that food does count.

🟢Mayocoba Beans. Freshly prepared. Salt to taste.



Is it just me or am I the only one who loves beans because they can taste good?

Pictured above  are some beautiful Mayocoba beans I made for a holliday dinner last year as an accompaniment for roasted duck. Mayocoba beans are savory enough to stand on their own yet earthy enough to share the plate with a robust partner. Like roast duck.

The Mayocoba bean is a native of Peru. Mayocobas grow many places now including California which is where I source from. My taste for savory beans developed early on because I grew up eating Mexican street food and New England baked beans on a regular basis. We probably go through about 20 pounds a year per person. The average American on the other hand eats closer to 6 pounds.

Beans do need tender loving care to achieve tastiness. Heirloom beans, some culinary skill, an honest olive oil, the right amount of salt, flavorful aromatics like onion, carrot, fennel, and a handful of parsley.

Why heirloom beans? Because these varieties tend to have more nuanced flavor profiles than commodity crops.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

 Beans have officially displaced kale as the new nutrition obsession as per a headline that crossed my feed recently. My dietitian colleagues, the advisory committee for DGA2025, a growing number of Influencers, and the combined marketing muscle of American farmers who grow them – everyone seems to agree that a healthy dietary pattern includes eating a lot more beans.

If those Mayocoba beans pictured above were a product however I couldn’t market them as healthy because I used too much salt. At the same time, the amount I used meets the FDA Phase II sodium goal for restaurants.

In my view, we’re not going to be able to persuade Americans to eat more beans if we ignore palatability.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to make a respectable place for moderation within the healthy model?